A Series Of Interconnected Disasters

Yes.

200,000

As the US surpasses 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, survivors have a message: This is not a hoax

By Theresa Waldrop, CNN

Updated 7:40 PM ET, Tue September 22, 2020

Even as the nation surpasses 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, there are still people who think the coronavirus is a hoax. Survivors of the disease and members of victims' families beg to differ and are sharing their very real experiences with the deadly disease.

Ann and Marvin Robinson, a married couple in Casper, Wyoming, got the virus almost three months ago. Marvin, 73, still has shortness of breath, and both are battling fatigue.

"We have friends who still believe it's a hoax. They think that it's going to go away on Election Day," Ann, 72, told CNN's Brianna Keilar on Tuesday.

"It's trying to convince people that the 200,000 people who have died were important," Ann said of her efforts to assure people of the reality of the virus.

Their friends "kind of discount the fact that older people get it that have underlying conditions, that they were going to die anyway," Ann said. "Well, I'm an older person and I have underlying conditions, and I intend to live for a lot more years."

As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 6.88 million people have contracted the virus nationwide, and at least 200,477 people have died.

Covid-19 is now the second-leading cause of death in the US, just after heart disease, according to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

Heather-Elizabeth Brown, a 35-year-old police chaplain and corporate trainer in the Detroit area, spent about 100 days in the hospital with Covid-19. More than a month of her hospital stay was spent on a ventilator and in a coma in intensive care.

She said she still has trouble breathing and with fatigue.

"Simple things like getting up the stairs or walking to my car or outside to get something winds me, and the fatigue factor is also a really big part of the after effects," Brown said.

"I find that I can't get through a whole day without having to stop and lie down and rest, just because I'm absolutely exhausted from doing everyday simple tasks like, you know, getting a shower or making breakfast."

"I absolutely want people to know that Covid is a real disease," Brown told Keilar. "It's not fake, it's not made up, it's not a conspiracy. It is something that is communicable and it is something that can be very dangerous."

Sondra Wolfe lost her husband to Covid-19. She is frustrated that the pandemic has become a political issue in the United States.

"People see the numbers and so many of them don't care," Wolfe told CNN last week. "I want to put a human face and a family, what a family is going through, the grief that this has caused, and maybe change some minds that this is a real thing."

Diana Berrent was one of the first in her New York community to be diagnosed with the virus on March 18, she said.

She founded a support group for survivors, Survivors Corps, that has more than 90,000 members.

At the end of August, Berrent was "still having terrible GI issues, massive headaches, and what feels like a deep ear infection," she told CNN's Jake Tapper. "But it pales in comparison to what many of our members are experiencing, really dramatic things, neurological issues, tachycardia, things as dramatic as Covid-onset diabetes and Covid-onset lupus."

What she wants people to know, she said, is that "this is not a matter of either getting the flu or dying. There is a very, very large bucket in the middle, which seems to constitute a huge proportion of people who get Covid, who are not recovering. You do not want to end up in that group of people."

When you see people's stories on Survivor's Corps of, for example, a 25-year-old who is writing a living will and "don't think they're going to make it to see their wedding day, you'll have a change of heart," Berrent said.

Maureen Fagan's sister Adeline Fagan, 28-year-old and a second-year OB-GYN resident living in Houston, died Saturday after battling Covid-19 for a few months. Fagan's family has been speaking out since in an effort to save other lives.

"Everyone could be an Adeline and that's the scary part of this," Fagan told CNN's Kate Bolduan, asking people to follow the guidelines to protect other people.

"If you can do something as simple as wearing the mask, social distancing, even just using hand sanitizer, to do your part," she said.

"I think you have a right to do that, just as a human being and trying to be a good person."

Link to original article:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/22/us/covid-19-survivors-say-virus-not-a-hoax/index.html

R.I.P. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

R.I.P. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The legendary Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, the second woman confirmed to the court after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She was a pioneering advocate for women’s rights and subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, becoming its most prominent member.

Her loss is a disaster for the United States Supreme Court, the judicial system as a whole, and most especially for the citizens of this country. The Monster in the White House is going to try to appoint a replacement who will gut any and all social progress made in the last 50 years. With only a little over THREE MONTHS left to be in power, the Republicans are going to try to rush a nomination and confirmation, completely forgetting how they effectively blocked a vote on Obama appointee Merrick Garland, claiming that since Obama was an outgoing President, there was insufficient time to confirm a Supreme Court judge, even though the appointment was in March of 2016, a full NINE MONTHS before Obama was to leave office. We expect hypocrisy from them. In fact, just days before her death, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed." Unfortunately, the Radical Republican Agenda does not care about RBG's wishes.

Burning

We're on fire.
Climate Catastrophe is real.
Science is real.
Climate is different from weather.
This is not a "process" that is natural. It has not happened before.We are seeing Climate Catastrophe happen right before us. Everything that was predicted 20 years ago is happening now. Just as climatologists thought it would.

I was evacuated from my home, not knowing if it would survive or burn.
I have seen raining ash.
I have seen a dim sun in an orange sky.
I have struggled to breathe in air thick with smoke.
It is real.

The Miniature Apocalyptic Worlds of Nix and Gerber

I am amazed at the miniature worlds made by Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber.

These were all made pre-virus, but these abandoned businesses have a special, eerie poignancy now.

Artist statement:
"I don’t really have a death wish, it just seems that way. For the last eight years my photographs have highlighted a fictional urban landscape ‘after’. An aquarium after a flood, a church after a fire, a beauty parlor after…who knows what. Mankind is gone and what remains are vacant fragments of buildings, a few slowly being reclaimed by nature. These photos began their lives as complex dioramas sculpted out of foam board, paint, plaster and wood. Built in great detail from scratch, the dioramas reflect their previous inhabitants’ daily lives.

As an artist, I have always taken inspiration from my surroundings. I grew up in the 1970’s in rural western Kansas. Every season brought with it a new disaster or weather phenomenon. As a child I personally experienced tornados, floods, blizzards and drought. I was never scared or upset by them because I had my parents to worry about the implications. Rather, these events brought excitement to a life that by most people’s standards was quite dull. I also grew up on steady diet of 1970’s television and cinema. Saturday night meant the Carroll Burnett Show, popcorn and a can of coke. My small Kansas town of Norton, population 3500, had a single movie house that ran Disney features on Saturday afternoon, and in the evenings it showed the genre that was popular at the time, dystopian cinema. It was in this small movie house reeking of popcorn and sticky floors that I was mesmerized by movies such as Planet of the Apes, Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and Airport‘76. As a six year old viewing these kinds of movies, I believe it had a profound effect on the art I create today. My work to date can be described as disaster mixed with subtle humor.

I began “The City” series after moving to New York in 1999. Surrounded by great architecture, skyscrapers, and bridges, the urban landscape couldn’t help but find its way into my work. Still a fan of dystopian entertainment, think Blade Runner, Alien, The Hunger Games, etc, my current series is a mashup of my new urban life and a look towards an apocalyptic future. “The City” imagines what New York City and Brooklyn would look like if suddenly mankind had disappeared."

Top to bottom: Bar; Beauty Shop; Casino; Chinese Take-Out; Circulation Desk; Control Room; Laundromat (day); Laundromat (night); Natural History; Subway; Anatomy Classroom

http://www.lorinix.net/
http://www.nixgerberstudio.com/

A Warning

History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump
by Tobias Stone, writing for Medium.com

It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re intended just to challenge and be part of a wider dialogue.

My background is archaeology, so also history and anthropology. It leads me to look at big historical patterns. My theory is that most peoples’ perspective of history is limited to the experience communicated by their parents and grandparents, so 50–100 years. To go beyond that you have to read, study, and learn to untangle the propaganda that is inevitable in all telling of history. In a nutshell, at university I would fail a paper if I didn’t compare at least two, if not three opposing views on a topic. Taking one telling of events as gospel doesn’t wash in the comparative analytical method of research that forms the core of British academia. (I can’t speak for other systems, but they’re definitely not all alike in this way).

So zooming out, we humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another. This handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite literally can’t put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in the midst of the Plague it must have felt like the end of the world.

But a defining feature of humans is their resilience. To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here: “By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,“ …In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality.”

But for the people living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the Roses, English Civil War… it’s a long list. Events of massive destruction from which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape.

At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.

My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50–100 year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again. As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit, and Trump are dismissed now.

Then after the War to end all Wars, we went and had another one. Again, for a historian it was quite predictable. Lead people to feel they have lost control of their country and destiny, people look for scapegoats, a charismatic leader captures the popular mood, and singles out that scapegoat. He talks in rhetoric that has no detail, and drums up anger and hatred. Soon the masses start to move as one, without any logic driving their actions, and the whole becomes unstoppable.

That was Hitler, but it was also Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Mugabe, and so many more. Mugabe is a very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving. See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20–40 million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it again and again.

But at the time people don’t realise they’re embarking on a route that will lead to a destruction period. They think they’re right, they’re cheered on by jeering angry mobs, their critics are mocked. This cycle, the one we saw for example from the Treaty of Versaille, to the rise of Hitler, to the Second World War, appears to be happening again. But as with before, most people cannot see it because:

1. They are only looking at the present, not the past or future

2. They are only looking immediately around them, not at how events connect globally

3. Most people don’t read, think, challenge, or hear opposing views

Trump is doing this in America. Those of us with some oversight from history can see it happening. Read this brilliant, long essay in the New York magazine to understand how Plato described all this, and it is happening just as he predicted. Trump says he will Make America Great Again, when in fact America is currently great, according to pretty well any statistics. He is using passion, anger, and rhetoric in the same way all his predecessors did — a charismatic narcissist who feeds on the crowd to become ever stronger, creating a cult around himself. You can blame society, politicians, the media, for America getting to the point that it’s ready for Trump, but the bigger historical picture is that history generally plays out the same way each time someone like him becomes the boss.

On a wider stage, zoom out some more, Russia is a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear and passion to establish a cult around himself. Turkey is now there too. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia are heading that way, and across Europe more Trumps and Putins are waiting in the wings, in fact funded by Putin, waiting for the popular tide to turn their way.

We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way — all things are connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say ‘oh, you’re going to blame that on Brexit too??’ But they don’t realise that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.

Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split. The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two ended.

An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:

Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honour NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.

With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends ‘peace keeping forces’ and ‘aid lorries’ into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He annexes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).

A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?

This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.

It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. How could I sit in a nice café in London, writing this, without wanting to run away. How could people read it and make sarcastic and dismissive comments about how pro-Remain people should stop whining, and how we shouldn’t blame everything on Brexit. Others will read this and sneer at me for saying America is in great shape, that Trump is a possible future Hitler (and yes, Godwin’s Law. But my comparison is to another narcissistic, charismatic leader fanning flames of hatred until things spiral out of control). It’s easy to jump to conclusions that oppose pessimistic predictions based on the weight of history and learning. Trump won against the other Republicans in debates by countering their claims by calling them names and dismissing them. It’s an easy route but the wrong one.

Ignoring and mocking the experts , as people are doing around Brexit and Trump’s campaign, is no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then finding later you’ve developed incurable cancer. A little thing leads to an unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you’d listened and thought a bit. But people smoke, and people die from it. That is the way of the human.

So I feel it’s all inevitable. I don’t know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover, and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end — for the thousands of Turkish teachers who just got fired, for the Turkish journalists and lawyers in prison, for the Russian dissidents in gulags, for people lying wounded in French hospitals after terrorist attacks, for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.

What can we do? Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority. See Clay Shirky’s Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages. We need to understand and use social media. We need to harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn’t. We need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides.

(Perhaps I’m just writing this so I can be remembered by history as one of the people who saw it coming.)

The original essay can be found here:
https://medium.com/@theonlytoby/history-tells-us-what-will-happen-next-with-brexit-trump-a3fefd154714#.19j6eil7t

BEAUTY: Photography--Dietmar Eckell

I will let Dietmar Eckell, the photographer himself speak about his photo series Happy End:

"Happy End is a photo-project about miracles in aviation history - 15 airplanes that had forced landings but ALL on board survived and were rescued from remote locations. The planes have been abandoned in the middle of nowhere for 10 years and up to 70 years. It's part of my long term project 'restwert' (German for residual value) to document abandoned objects with fascinating backgrounds like cold war relicts [sic], Olympic sites, flooded churches, railroad tracks, never finished nuclear reactors, overgrown adventure parks etc. It started with my interest in the visual disruption of nostalgic technology in endless landscapes - but soon I got hooked on these planes/stories and spent over two years researching and documenting them. Aviation miracles are rare and the planes remaining out there are very remote - but the challenge was motivating and it was like a pilgrimage to get to these 'wonders' on 4 continents from Papua New Guinea to the Arctic Circle.  My photography is not about documenting the planes condition & details but how they are embedded in nature after so many years. I try to capture the surreal beauty of these settings using high viewpoints or shooting through layers. Inspired by the shipwreck painters of the romantic period I look for dramatic skies, late light or fall colors to 'glorify' these wonderful planes."

Douglas C-47, crashed February 1950, Yukon Canada

Grumman HU-16 Albatross, crashed August 2004, Mexico

Curtiss C-46 Commando, crashed November 1979, Manitoba Canada

Vought F4U Corsair, crashed 1948, Hawaii

Bristol 170, crashed May 1956, NWT Canada

Fairchild C-82, crashed January 1965, Alaska

Fairchild C-82, crashed January 1965, Alaska (rear view)

B-24 Liberator, crashed October 1943, Papua New Guinea

Douglas C-53, crashed February 1942, Australia

Avro Shackleton, crashed July 1994, Western Sahara

http://www.dietmareckell.com/

BEAUTY: Painting--Eric Edward Esper

The work of Chicago resident Eric Edward Esper seems dispassionate and static but upon closer inspection, and upon learning the names of paintings along with their narratives, one sees that Esper has a deliciously creepy sensibility. Both macabre and memorial in nature, his "Chicago Disasters" series depicts horrendous catastrophes that have befallen the city over the years. He starts with the Great Fire of 1871... and moves on to capsized ships, conflagrations, and train crashes. One can't help but feel like a rubber-necker, but the images are presented in such an innocent, curiously remote, clinical way...

Top to bottom: The Great Fire of 1871; The Capsizing of the SS Eastland; Green Hornet Streetcar Inferno; Our Children of Angels; 1977 CTA El Train Derailment

His series of aerial views of the compounds of various cults over the years is just as creepy, but highly imaginative at the same time.

The Manson Family's Spahn Movie Ranch, 1200 Santa Suzana Pass, Chatsworth, California,1969

Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, Jonestown, Guyana, 1978

Mount Carmel, Branch Davidian Compound, Double EE Ranch Road, Waco, Texas, 1993

Heavens Gate Cult Mansion, 18241 Colina Norte, Rancho Santa Fe, California, March, 1997

http://ericesper.com/home.html

Things To Come

"This week, our nation has anxiously watched as Hurricane Sandy lashed the East Coast and caused widespread damage--affecting millions. Now more than ever, our neighbors need our help. Please consider donating or volunteering for your local aid organizations. The images of Sandy’s flooding brought back memories of a similar--albeit smaller scale-- event in Nashville just two years ago. There, unprecedented rainfall caused widespread flooding, wreaking havoc and submerging sections of my hometown. For me, the Nashville flood was a milestone. For many, Hurricane Sandy may prove to be a similar event: a time when the climate crisis—which is often sequestered to the far reaches of our everyday awareness became a reality. Sandy was also affected by other symptoms of the climate crisis. As the hurricane approached the East Coast, it gathered strength from abnormally warm coastal waters. At the same time, Sandy's storm surge was worsened by a century of sea level rise. Scientists tell us that if we do not reduce our emissions, these problems will only grow worse. Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to come. We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather."
--Al Gore, writing on his personal blog.

Is "the jury still out" now? How much more proof do we need?